Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday August 29, 2012 @12:52PM
from the to-be-fair-so-do-i dept.

derekmead writes "Hot on the heels of the U.S. Air Force's most recent failed test of an unmanned hypersonic vehicle, Russia now says it wants to jump into the hypersonic game with a long-range bomber. Will Russia's newest Bear fly at 4,500 miles an hour? The Russian military sure hopes so. 'I think we need to go down the route of hypersonic technology and we are moving in that direction and are not falling behind the Americans,' Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said on Russian television. 'The question is will we copy the Americans' 40-year experience and create a [Northrop] B-2 analog or will we go down a new, ultramodern technology route, looking to the horizon, and create a machine able to penetrate air defenses and carry out a strike on any aggressor.' The Russians want their plane operational by 2020, which doesn't seem particularly realistic — we are talking about five times the speed of sound here, and Russia is just starting engine development. The U.S., meanwhile, has been investing in its Waverider program since 2004, and the last test of the X-51A scramjet-powered missile failed after just 15 seconds."

Why bother with any of this as missile technology will permit the same speeds at a fraction of the cost?

If you are going to want to deliver a payload, missiles are the way to go, since you can deliver more mega-tons per dollar and he who does that wins, whatever winning might be defined as in the event any of this technology is actually used.

This is more about "hype" for military budgets than for "hypersonic" travel. Those foolish enough to fall for the hype are one step closer to paying for it.

It can take off with full tanks, it just doesn't because it's single engine performance (needed to be considered incase you lose one on takeoff) is poor - they used to fly with full tanks from Kadena regularly, depending on the mission profile.

Also, there is plenty of room for weapons bays in the payload bays aft of the cockpit - that's where the YF-12A had its Aim-47A missiles stowed. Yup, there was an interceptor variant of the A-12/SR-71 tested.

It's still the wrong aircraft for the job, because it's been out of service for nearly two decades, and the jigs and tool sets have been destroyed for nearly twice that long.

Urgh - "it doesn't on many mission profiles because..." that was supposed to be. It's standard mission profile was to take off with low fuel in the tanks and tank in the air, because it solved both the engine out issues and it was easier than setting up the fuel tank inerting system on the ground.

It's still probably a better starting point than an empty piece of paper and completely unproven technology. It's operational characteristics demonstrate what has already been done with 60s era technology. No flights of fancy required.

I remember reading that if you where to update the SR71 engines with modern alloys (rememberer that the SR71 is a 1960's era plane) that it was possible for them to reach around the Mach 6 range.. as the limiting factor in the fitted engines was their ability to withstand the heat they produced..

Neither can a B-52, but 35 tons of payload is plenty of room for carrying ordnance, as sure as shooting.

And the Air Force DID have the F-12 program [wikipedia.org], notionally working on a high-supersonic interceptor to replace the canceled F-108 Rapier program [wikipedia.org]. But that program, and its prototype YF-12 aircraft, were also used as public cover for the SR-71 program (A-12) under development at the time, so it's hard to know how seriously the Air Force took it.

Glad someone else is stepping up to the plate. Development on such equipment could easily lead to civilian hypersonic aircraft, getting rid of 15 hour flights to Australia and such. Also sparks research on better ways of space travel, as the scramjet is closer to being space capable than a traditional jet engine.

Propelling a train in a tube with air pressure would make the problem of drag worse, not better. Sure, it's better for the vehicle, but overall you have to cram your air mass through the tube, drastically increasing the surface area that is exposed to the high velocity air stream. That's not to say such a pneumatic tube scheme couldn't work for lower speed transports, just that it doesn't seem to be a feasible option for ultra high speed transport.

People already balked at the price of a Concorde ticket, getting them to pay even more for a Hypersonic Scramjet (and lets face it, the laws of physics are going to be harsh to your fuel prices) is probably not a sound business plan. 10 hour flights are annoying, but not $5000 annoying.

Fifteen!? Luxury! From the UK you're looking at about 24 hours *flying* time, ignoring any time on the ground when you stop over somewhere in the middle. It's a good job I enjoy reading on flights:) Faster planes would be good... faster and more efficient planes would be amazing!

Fifteen!? Luxury! From the UK you're looking at about 24 hours *flying* time, ignoring any time on the ground when you stop over somewhere in the middle. It's a good job I enjoy reading on flights:) Faster planes would be good... faster and more efficient planes would be amazing!

15 hours for a non-stop flight. Looking it up, it would appear the longest flight time for a commercial flight is 18 hours 50 minutes, from New York to Singapore.

Jet engines are restricted to lower altitude use because of the lack of air. Scramjets have a higher ceiling, because they use a different intake process which requires less ambient air. So we go from needing lots of air (jet) to needing less air (scramjet). The next step would be an engine that does not require air (space). It's the next logical progression of engine development.

Not requiring water is a world of difference away from not requiring to drink water from a spring because they get it from another source. They still need the water just like a scramjet still needs air. Unless you're proposing they just take it along with them, but then it's essentially just another rocket and not based on scramjet technology at all.

Please explain for the unwashed masses how a scramjet is closer to being space capable? Doesnt it require a funneled input of compressed gas to function... gas that I assume is not too abundant in the vacuum of space?

Thing of javelin throwers: they take a running start before throwing the javelin to get maximum distance. In the same way, you'd use the scramjet to accelerate as long as you can, then use a rocket engine to take you the rest of the way. And you might be able to use the scramjet as a rocket en

He read that on/. a few weeks ago, and a number of us dug into the details. It turns out to come from the BBC, and is a heavily-rounded, but essentially correct, comparison of the Concorde's taxi allowance to some 737 flavor on one of the shortest scheduled airline flights (just across the English Channel, IIRC), asphalt-to-asphalt.

Of course, the short hop is carrying enough fuel for the hop (plus a bit for diversion, etc.), while the Concorde is lugging fuel for an entire Atlantic crossing, so the roughly

Concorde didn't cruise at Mach 2 in afterburner -- imagine how much fuel it would use pouring JP-4 into the engine exhausts for two hours. Concorde flew supersonic at 20km altitude by means of large powerful engines which burned a lot of fuel but in a conventional manner. It did use afterburners on takeoff and initial climb out because the engines and the intake nacelles were optimised for supersonic cruise flight and at takeoff the fuel load, as much as 50% of its total on-wheels weight made the entire ai

The problem is that engine design improvements for airliners over the past fifty years have been aimed at subsonic flight regimes producing the modern high-ratio bypass turbofans where the core jet turbine only produces 15-20% of the direct thrust and the fan produces most of the "push". Sadly fans don't work in supersonic regimes although if some aerodynamic Einstein ever comes up with a solution then the world will beat a path to her door.

That restricts supersonic flight to rockets, scramjets etc. and to pure jet engines with variable intake nacelle structures that can slow the incoming air to subsonic speeds so it can be compressed, burned and turned into thrust. The Olympus 593s that powered the Concordes are fifty-year-old designs. Modern engines with similar capabilities are a bit smaller, lighter and more fuel-efficient but they are not even twice as efficient as the originals.

Yes, slowing down the air to subsonic speeds was the job of the nacelle structure in front of the engines on Concorde. It means high-bypass turbofans like the RR Trent 900 and GE-90 couldn't easily be used for supersonic flight since they provide a lot of their thrust by propelling air using the big fandisc driven off the jet turbine in the middle.

Supersonic fighters and such use low-bypass fans but they're not very efficient at transonic speeds since the fanblades don't work well in that regime. The benef

The tanks leaking was not the reason for taking off with a low fuel load - see my post above.

In service, Concorde made plenty of profit for British Airways (no idea about Air France) and the clientele that flew on it loved it - it had a smooth, quiet ride and engine noise was not an issue for those in the cabin (the engines are set back toward the very end of the cabin and some distance from the fuselage, not to mention underneath a wing).

In service, Concorde made plenty of profit for British Airways (no idea about Air France)

Concorde as a plane made a profit. As an aircraft model, it did not. The problem was its huge operating cost for a trans-Atlantic flight (somewhere between $1500-$2500 per passenger - if the crash hadn't killed it, the spike in fuel prices in 2007-2008 would have). That meant your clientele were only a thin sliver of the overall market, and most of them were concentrated on a few routes (between major economic centers, or an economic center and major resort destination). On top of that, a few planes completely saturated your market on a route. That's fine if you're the only carrier which flies the plane on one of those golden routes. But if you were hoping to sell hundreds of the planes to recoup the billions of pounds/francs spent developing the aircraft, you're totally screwed.

Yeah if you got one of the $100 HP Touchpads during its closeout sale, it was hugely profitable for you. But the fact that HP never recouped its huge investment in developing the device means it was a financial failure.

and the clientele that flew on it loved it - it had a smooth, quiet ride and engine noise was not an issue for those in the cabin (the engines are set back toward the very end of the cabin and some distance from the fuselage, not to mention underneath a wing).

Concorde seat width was 17.8". Most economy class seats [seatguru.com] are 17"-18". Seat pitch was 37" which is slightly better than the 31"-34" norm for economy, but not by much. You basically paid first class price for an economy-plus class seat. But the service, speed, and experience were top-notch. I'm sad I never got a chance to fly it, but don't kid yourself - it simply wasn't economically competitive with regular air travel.

XB-70 Valkyrie on our side, and the Soviets had something along those lines as well.

Then surface-to-air missiles showed up, and it became clear no bomber could hope to outrun them, so we went with low-observable and/or terrain-following tech. Remember, it's easier to make a missile capable of X speed (just a motor, a warhead, and fuel for one quick interception) than a bomber flying X speed (many warheads, release mechanism, crew, and fuel to carry all that stuff a thousand miles), so you need a massive technological edge to win.

So... does Russia really think they can make hypersonic bombers, but some enemy that's worth using them on can't make even faster hypersonic SAMs?

There are other uses to a hypersonic aircraft than simply dodging missiles. The ability to arrive on target in minutes instead of hours, for example. Plus, even if the bomber isn't technically faster than the missile, missiles have limited fuel capacity and require a certain reaction time before they can be fired, so if you can build a bomber fast enough, by the time the missile is fired it can't reach you before it runs out of fuel. This is even more true if you are traveling at extremely high altitudes. If you have a bomber traveling at Mach 5 (1 mile per second, roughly) and a missile traveling at Mach 6 launched at the bomber when it is 20 miles away (easily possible for a high altitude bomber to hit a target that far away), it will take 100 seconds to hit, in which time the missile must travel 120 miles, which is outside the range of, say, a Patriot missile (which travels at Mach 5). And the higher the speed, the more fuel it takes for the same distance. A bomber can afford that. It's a lot harder for a disposable missile to do the same.

Only if they're within minutes travel of the target - otherwise, it's still an hour or more. Hypersonic is fast, but it's not magical.

Hypersonic planes (such as the X-51A) can travel at 4,000+ MPH. Stationed at a remote base for the US or nearly anywhere in the country for the Russians they can hit any target within 2,000 miles (thats considerably more than the distance between Moscow and London or Tel Aviv, for reference) in 1/2 an hour. That would take 3 or more hours for a subsonic aircraft. So yes, minutes instead of hours.

And at that speed, even a long range (270 mile or so, such as the AN/TPS-75 radar the Air Force uses, and thats

So... does Russia really think they can make hypersonic bombers, but some enemy that's worth using them on can't make even faster hypersonic SAMs?

The Russians are not stupid so no, I'm sure they know full well this idea is folly. However, this fits with their recent uptick in hostile behavior where they are testing the US military responses and ratcheting up the "cold war" type behavior. Recently they had an attack sub in the Gulf of Mexico for a month (then told us about it) and at the same time they had a bomber test our air defenses by flying into our airspace. They are also trying to get navy bases set up in Cuba and Venezuela claiming that th

Yeah, that's crazy. But then, we ignore a ton of problems that need fixing so we can build airplanes that cost billions of dollars each to fight guerrillas armed only with cheap knockoff assault rifles. That's not nearly as crazy, but it's out there.

needs to defend itself against brave young women in punk bands with these

Haven't you heard? The so-called "brave young women" are agents provocateur on CIA payroll, with the goal of destabilizing the country and causing a revolution that would cause it to splinter, so that individual pieces can then be overrun by NATO and China to extract their precious natural resources, using local population as slaves. Don't you watch RT?

(also see this [wikipedia.org] - and never underestimate the power of propaganda)

If Matthew Broderick had been a normal teenager he would have noticed that he was alone in his room with Ally Sheedy and turned off his computer. But no, he had to ignore her and hack into NORAD. There's a lesson in that.

Given that the ISS is ~360 km from the Earth, and it has a 92 minute orbital period, it seems that bombs could be lifted into space, then launched from there. With sufficient supplies and advanced notice you could get enough stuff in position over the long term and deploy in minutes 4500mph = 2km/s and therefore could be at the surface in 180 seconds (3 minutes) once launched. Then there's the issue of changing orbit, which lets assume takes 1 orbit. So you can stike anywhere in the wold in 95 minutes. Can you fuel, prep and deploy a plane in that time? I think not.

Given that the ISS is ~360 km from the Earth, and it has a 92 minute orbital period, it seems that bombs could be lifted into space, then launched from there. With sufficient supplies and advanced notice you could get enough stuff in position over the long term and deploy in minutes 4500mph = 2km/s and therefore could be at the surface in 180 seconds (3 minutes) once launched. Then there's the issue of changing orbit, which lets assume takes 1 orbit. So you can stike anywhere in the wold in 95 minutes. Can you fuel, prep and deploy a plane in that time? I think not.

Of course you have to get the bomb through the atmosphere and to the intended target without it burning up or exploding on the way down. The bomb would need to be in essence a re-entry vehicle. A lot of stuff can go wrong - like missing your target or filling the atmosphere with something toxic and widespread.

Not that you need nukes to wreck things from orbit. A dense, sturdy object that's going at orbital velocity would itself pack the punch of a nuke (from tactical to strategic size depending on mass of impactor). Project Thor was the U.S. military's exploration of the idea.

Totally. We can ship our bombs up there and store them on our side, I can't see any other country having an issue with that. Then of course Russia would match us and store their own bombs there too, and whenever war breaks out we'll just bomb the other side of the ISS. That'll teach 'em. Hopefully the falling hulk will land on Russia, for good measure (or great justice).

Then there's the issue of changing orbit, which lets assume takes 1 orbit.

Right, let's just assume that the ISS is able to quickly change orbit at will so that it fits the point we're trying to make. Let's al

And on the defensive side, you know exactly where and when to look. And also, it actually isn't that easy to shoot something downward from orbit, especially if you want it to arrive in a non-molten, non-plasma state. True, it's only 3 minutes up, but it's also moving at 17,000 mph, and that's the hard part.

The problem is how to deliver a weapon to a target in your enemy's territory. A hypersonic craft is an attempt to do it so fast that your enemy can't react. Stealth is an attempt to get so close befor

...that they're still a world power. That means building a lot of expensive, useless weapons, because that's what world powers do. Ah, for the good old days, when you could just round up the slaves and put up a pyramid!

The Russians are quite good at iterative design and have been for decades. They'll built a jet, make improvements, build another, make more improvements, and so on. The end result is they tend to have programs that operate at a fraction of the cost of the US analog. But what they have at 2020 won't be anywhere close to what the US has. It may never be anywhere close to the US as they have always had trouble with collecting the intellectual capital to compete with high paying US Defense contractors. In th

I believe it. Russian Engineering always seems to have its house in order. They have experience with Super Cavitation [wikipedia.org] and perhaps there is some applicable cross over tech. Lets not forget that a rocket plane is feasible. If it was me, I'd remove the hypersonic engine as a dependency from the get go and allow design to progress in that area once other issues are proven by flight testing and there is a solid platform to test and evolve the engine upon. Even if the platform never gets an upgraded engine, a

So with the Russians just starting on hypersonic engine design, looks to me like they are only 15 seconds behind the US:)

Or maybe not, according to wikipedia they were doing something 20+ years ago:

First working scramjet "GLL Holod" in world flies on 28 November 1991 reaching speed mach 5.8. However, the collapse of Soviet Union stopped the funding of the project.

After NASA's NASP program was cut, American scientists began to look at adopting available Russian technology as a less expensive alternative to developing hypersonic flight. On November 17, 1992, Russian scientists with some additional French support successfully launched a scramjet engine "Holod" in Kazakhstan6. From 1994 to 1998 NASA worked with the Russian Central Institute of Aviation Motors (CIAM) to test a dual-mode scramjet engine and transfer technology and experience to the West. Four tests took place, reaching Mach numbers of 5.5, 5.35, 5.8, and 6.5. The final test took place aboard a modified SA-5 surface to air missile launched from the Sary Shagan test range in the Republic of Kazakhstan on 12 February 1998. According to CIAM telemetry data, first ignition of the scramjet was unsuccessful, but after 10 seconds the engine was started and the experimental system flew 77s with good performance, up until the planned SA-5 missile self-destruction (according to NASA, no net thrust was achieved).

Some sources in the Russian military have said that a hypersonic (10-15M) maneuverable ICBM warhead was tested.

The Russians want their plane operational by 2020, which doesn't seem particularly realistic — we are talking about five times the speed of sound here, and Russia is just starting engine development. The U.S., meanwhile, has been investing in its Waverider program since 2004, and the last test of the X-51A scramjet-powered missile failed after just 15 seconds.

Maybe they'll be funding computer hacking/espionage methods instead of scramjet or hypersonic airplane development- that way, they'll have a hypersonic bomber (plans, at least) soon after we do, at a fraction of the development costs.

The real issue is: Will the Russian government be willing (and able!) to sink the billions of dollars worth of rubles into this project over the 20 or so years it will need? The 2020 date is crazy, this is a new frontier, 20 years is more likely, and only if there is full an continued support from the government.

As long as the money is siphoned off to cronies then yes the Russian government will be more than happy to sink billions of dollars worth of rubles into the project for 20 years or so, in fact they may be able to go for 40 years, but nothing is getting off the ground.

No, not really. They were softened up nicely in 1941-43, but by the end of 45 were pretty much fully recovered as far as war capacity was concerned. In fact, the USSR was in a better shape by then, because it had all its heavy industry restored and running at full capacity, but this time tucked away safely at Urals, where no German (or American) bomber could have reached. 10 million in casualties sounds pretty bad, and it was, but there were still considerable manpower reserves - we're talking about a count

Are you sure that you're not talking about the USA? Lets revise that last paragraph.

The crooks and thieving bankers who run the USA don't actually need any science or technology. They just need to be in the close proximity to government bailouts to saw off their share while nobody is looking.